


Through New Eyes

by hafren



Series: New Made [1]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-27
Updated: 2009-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:40:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First in an AU series called "New Made", spinning off the episode "Death Watch". Deeta and Vinni's duel takes a different turn...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through New Eyes

Vila closed his eyes and walked into another man's head. At about the same moment, so did several million citizens of Teal. Very few of them, however, had anything like his intuitive capacity.

They saw a derelict, abandoned building; saw it through the eyes of a gunfighter. Wide, empty spaces with light streaming through them - danger. Debris scattered around the floor: memorise where, avoid. Walls, corners, doorways: safety of a sort, somewhere against your back. They sensed tension, alertness, fear.

Vila, looking through the same eyes, felt the bleak landscape like a reflection. _This is me. I mean him._ The desolation, the aimlessness, spoke to him. All his senses alert, on edge, he felt the man's fear, not of what might happen but that nothing would. An overwhelming ache in his body resolved itself into a thought. "Something has to happen. Something that will change my life for ever. Because if it does not, I would as soon be dead."

Del Tarrant closed his eyes and walked into a place he thought he knew. And it was different, like some building you recall towering above you in your childhood, but when you go back, it's shrunk to normal size. And in your mind it was always bright sunshine, not this grey, clouded sky.

Max closed his eyes and walked, uncertainly, past signposts reading PRIVATE, KEEP OUT and TRESPASSERS WILL BE BITTERLY RESENTED.

Some eyes stayed open. Cally was a fighter. She had no problem with two men duelling and dying for millions; in fact it seemed both romantic and practical, a combination that appealed to her. But she did have a problem with said millions getting a vicarious thrill out of it. You want the thrill, then take the risk and the pain in your own body. Besides, Avon had asked her to watch dispassionately. That was going to be hard, what with Tarrant's brother being one of the combatants.

Avon associated closed eyes with nightmares. And seeing through the eyes of others had never been his thing.

As for the neutral arbiter, nobody expected her to take sides. Which was as well, since she didn't give a damn who won provided there was a medical examination of both corpse and victor afterwards. She sat back, with a little smile.

Dayna closed her eyes and walked into a very odd place indeed.

_Derelict building. Don't know where he is. Doesn't matter. There was something missing. Why aren't I worried? On edge. I should be looking and listening with every fibre. Planning. Not just waiting._

_ But it's more than that. Something else not right. I'm moving around the contours of this man's mind and it's like there's a hole in the middle of the map._

_ Something missing._

 

Del Tarrant felt the gun go off in his hand. Heard the other do the same. Just some noise or passing shadow. Not the real thing yet. He felt the tension in his brother's body, the nerves wound up to breaking point, the immediate, instinctive reactions. But something he was expecting was missing. The exhilaration, the high. _How can he be so tense, and yet somehow indifferent, as if it doesn't matter who wins?_

Vila felt the gun go off in his hand. Heard the other do the same. Like a computer game. That's what he thought it would be like; the excitement without the danger. Only he hadn't bargained on feeling. He's still him, Vila Restal who's scared stiff at the thought of one-to-one violence, and his stomach lurches with the kick of the gun. And now there's this other man as well, massively disillusioned with a life he'd give anything to change. And yet he has no choice but to protect it at all costs, including taking the other man's life; and when he does, there'll be another, and another, and nothing will ever change....

Cally was finding it as hard to be dispassionate as she had feared, but for different reasons. She no longer had any fears for Deeta. She watched Vinni, wandering about the ground with no thought of protecting his back, advertising his whereabouts by calling out, and she knew there was no way he could live. How on earth had he got into this situation? So young, so cocksure and so certainly dead. She could not keep from pitying him.

Behind his eyes, Dayna moved as you do in a dream, knowing you're dreaming. Knowing she - he was doing it all wrong, that he was too relaxed, too careless. And knowing, all the time, that he couldn't lose.

Avon and the neutral arbiter watched Vinni, giving away his position, and Deeta, circling round, coming up unobserved behind him and getting him in his sights. They watched him stand for a long moment doing nothing; both assumed gallantry had prevented him from shooting a man in the back, and both thought "Idiot". Avon was annoyed to find that he cared slightly.

Through Deeta's eyes, Vila saw the back of a young man in a silver suit trimmed with red. His hair was dark and thick; it would be soft as velvet if you ran your fingers through it. He imagined the nape of the neck, pale and smooth beneath. The man looked not just young but somehow untouched. New as the morning. Like a gunfighter might look when his skill was still a novelty, before he'd become jaded and tired. The arrogance in the young voice stirred him only to amusement and sympathy. It was part of the boy's newness, his innocence. Innocent young killer. The silver suit fitted closely on his slim body, curving over the buttocks in a beautiful, taut line he wanted desperately to stroke...

"Hang on," Vila thought, "I'm not like that".

Cally, Avon and the neutral arbiter watched as Deeta came softly up, right behind, and grabbed Vinni around the neck with one hand, while the other sent his gun spinning and pinned his arms. Then three pairs of eyes widened slightly as he bent his head and kissed Vinni's ear, tonguing his delicate way around the whorls and gently nipping at the lobe.

Behind his brother's eyes, Del Tarrant saw a sun explode, irrationally, into rainbows. Confused waves of tenderness, longing and pure lust broke over him and he heard teasing, affectionate words, not yet formed, which would one day be spoken. Saw a gap, the shape of someone young and vulnerable, which had been waiting to be filled. And between pain and shock, his eyes opened.

Dayna was rigid in her seat. She had killed often, never wondering how it felt to be killed, to know you were going to be killed. She didn't really know how it felt now. Puzzled. It shouldn't have been able to happen. An instinct, struggling violently, but the arms were too strong to escape. An emptiness. That gap again.

Deeta laughed softly. "Well, no point in whispering, not with all those millions inside my head. They'll all have to listen in, no help for it. Shush, don't struggle. I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to spend the rest of my life loving you. I know you don't feel like that about me yet, but you will. You're the thing that had to happen to me." He shifted his grip slightly, but didn't relax it for a second. "Oh, I know you'd kill me even now, if you could get free. But it's all going to change. For you, as well as me." He nuzzled the dark hair aside and rested his lips on Vinni's cheek. "So smooth," he murmured, "so new. You're like I was, you know that, years back? Before I went travelling. Tell you something, it isn't where people travel to that matters, it's what they're travelling from. I spent years not wanting to be me, not even wanting to know who I was. But it's all right now. I'm the man who loves you, and the man you're going to love."

Vila, still behind his eyes, felt so light he could take off and fly. Dayna felt the tense body she was in start to relax, just a little, as the adamantine grip on it conveyed what it could of comfort. The gentle words flooded into the darkness of the gap like rain into earth, but they were not lost in it. Something was there, some seed being stirred into the beginnings of life.

Cally was smiling ear to ear; Avon frowning thoughtfully. The neutral arbiter tapped her fingers on the desk.

Max resolved to ignore signposts in future.

Deeta looked up. "Are you listening, Liberator? Max told me about the bracelets. Can you get a couple of them down here?"

The neutral arbiter's eyes opened wide. She called angrily to her fellow-arbiters, with no result until she ripped the discs off them. "Do something! Get troops into that chamber!"

But Cally and Tarrant were already running to the teleport.

Avon shook his head and asked "Orac... that wasn't Servalan's plan, was it?"

"No. I believe I have worked out what the plan was, and if the one called Vinni does indeed teleport aboard it will an easy matter to confirm it."

 

In the medical bay, Avon showed Deeta the photographs that left no room for doubt. Deeta gazed at the miraculous circuitry, muttering "How could they get him so perfect?"

Sitting on the bed, stripped of most of his clothes and all his arrogance, Vinni looked small, lost and puzzled. He said softly, uncomprehendingly, "I'm not human. I'm not... human?"

Avon looked up briefly from the photos. "I shouldn't let it worry you. It's overrated."

Cally squeezed Vinni's hand. "A lot of you is. Your body's basically human and it works just as ours do. It's just that what makes it work isn't organic, like a human brain."

"So what am I?" he whispered.

Deeta came over and sat on the bed. He took Vinni in his arms and surveyed him appreciatively. "You're beautiful. You're the one I'm going to spend my life with."

"Are you mad?" his brother shouted. "That thing's programmed to kill you!"

"That is inaccurate." Orac never sounded happier than when correcting someone. "The subject's unusually fast reactions and accurate aim were programmed, as was the impulse to challenge and replace the then champion of Vandor. The confrontation with the champion of Teal followed from that by custom. Since the occasion for which the subject was programmed has now passed, so has the specific danger."

"It isn't like someone's controlling him from outside, then?" Vila asked.

"No. He will have to decide his own actions in future."

Vinni looked scared to death. Deeta pulled him close. "It's all right. I'll show you."

"How can you live with something that hasn't even got any emotions?" Tarrant protested. "That can't feel? That was made to be nothing but a professional gunman…." He bit his lip and fell silent.

"Vinni has feelings," Cally said quietly. "Look at him. Right now he is confused, afraid, worried. Those are all feelings. It's just they aren't very developed yet. Remember he was created a grown man without a past, without memories or experiences. There has been nothing to awaken his emotions, that's all."

Dayna nodded. "That's true. I felt it."

"No past," Deeta echoed. "No wonder you look so untouched. No past, and I'm your future." He looked speculatively into the dark, uncertain eyes, leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. He stroked the soft recesses with his tongue, biting gently, until, very hesitantly, Vinni's arms went around his neck.

"Told you so," Dayna said.

The blue of Tarrant's eyes was still clouded, but he reached out a hand to Deeta. "I still don't understand this, but it felt so sad in your head. If he's what makes you happy..."

Deeta took the hand gratefully. "He is. And if he wants to go with me" – he looked interrogatively at Vinni, who nodded – "then I'd be obliged if you could take us somewhere neutral and tolerant."

"No problem." Tarrant glanced over, received Avon's assent, and raced off to the flight deck to set a course. Avon waited until he was out of hearing before saying to Deeta "Actually I do see one danger. It – he – is, after all, programmed to shoot faster than he thinks. If you should ever have an argument... I could tinker with the programming if you like, tone down the gun skill."

"All right," Vinni said. He eyed his gun arm, a little sadly.

Deeta hugged him. "No. That's the thing he's good at; you can't take that from him. And I'll need him to watch my back" – he grinned – "while I'm watching his. I'll live with the risk."

"Bloody hell," Vila murmured. If the truth were known, one reason he hadn't gone with Kerril was that he was afraid of what she might do to him if they ever fell out. And here was Deeta planning to go to sleep every night beside a faster gun hand yet.

For a moment, he wished he could be back behind Deeta's eyes, so that he could feel what made such a risk worthwhile. What would it be like, to be someone's future, to watch new emotions wake inside them every day and know that you were the cause of it? To walk away from your past, the place you knew, even if you didn't like it much, into somewhere uncharted, and see not dangers but possibilities?

He shook himself. That was the trouble with holidays, they just left you more dissatisfied with home.


End file.
